The Thinkers : Which Came First?

"Graha told me this story," said Swara when she appeared, after, as usual, greeting with Basmalah and Salaam.

"'A salesman, tired of his job," Swara went on, 'gave it up to become a policeman—I was a little doubt, whether Graha meant a 'policeman' or a 'politician'.

Several months later, a friend asked him how he liked his new career.

'Well,' he replied, 'the pay could be better, and the hours can be long, but what I like about it is that the customer is always wrong.'" 

"Which came first," Swara then proceeded, "the chicken or the egg?" she offerred a question, such as we asked our friends when we were telling an anecdotes as an antidote. "All origins are obscure. In the history of primates, just who was the first Homo sapiens? And when that baby started babbling, just when was that sound considered its first actual word? In its Greek origin, philosophy literally means 'love of wisdom.' But even as people spoke grammatically before there was such a thing as grammar, wisdom had its lovers well before there was any such thing as philosophy. Early on there were various tentative groupings in these directions, but by the time of Plato and Aristotle the discipline was in full swing.

As the idea evolved, p hilosophy came to address three big themes: the works of nature, the works of humankind, and the endeavor to establish physically and cognitively productive interactions between the two.

The task of the discipline was thus to address 'the big questions' regarding humans, the world, and our knowledge of it. Issues of appearance and reality, knowledge and ignorance, and the ramifications of such grand ideas as God and nature, truth and beauty, normality and justice were now on the agenda of deliberation, with the focus on such issues as:

• Meaning : How the mechanisms of assertion and discourse work.
• Truth : How the truth of our claims is to be substantiated.
• Knowledge : How we are to secure information about the past, present, and future.
• Value : What sorts of goals, desiderata, and positivities there are for assessing the appropriateness of choices.
• Action : What we can do in implementing our decisions.
• Ethics : What we should do and how we ought to comport ourselves individually and collectively in relation to ourselves and others.

Throughout philosophy’s history, philosophers have employed little stories that help to make big points. Such anecdotes always issue double invitations: On the one hand they provide an occasion for learning more about the thought and work of the thinkers who act in or react to such anecdotes. And on the other hand they afford an invitation to think for oneself about the issues that are at stake. Philosophy is a field in which the answer to every question provides the material for yet further questions, and where the prospect and significance of those further questions depend upon their origin. Accordingly, this is a field that calls for attention to historical context. Here more than anywhere else, dealing with the issue effectively demands attention to the history of the field.

Nicholas Rescher wrote, 'It is fitting to go begin any survey of philosophical encounters with the biblical allegory of the Tower of Babel:

And the people said, Go, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth. And the LORD came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded. And the LORD said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. So, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech. So the LORD scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city. Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the LORD did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the LORD scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth. [Genesis II:4-9 (King James Version)]

This is a good place to begin because it puts up front one of philosophy’s most striking facts—the reality of disagreement and absent consensus. Why should this be? Does the reason perhaps lie in mutual incomprehension, with different philosophers simply talking past one another? This was the view of the English philosopher and historian R. G. Collingwood. As he saw it, different philosophers with discordant philosophical positions occupy separate and disconnected thought worlds. Adherents of conflicting theories literally 'talk a different language,' so that when one makes an assertion and the other a denial it is not really the same thing that is at issue. As Collingwood wrote,

If there were a permanent problem P, we could ask 'What did Kant, or Leibniz, or Berkeley, think about P?' and if that question could be answered, we could then go on to ask 'was Kant, or Leibniz, or Berkeley, right in what he thought about P?' But what is thought to be a permanent problem P is really a number of transitory problems, P1, P2, P3, . . . whose individual peculiarities are blurred by the historical myopia of the person who lumps them together under the name P.

On this view philosophical disagreement lies in incomprehension: thinkers of different places and times simply discuss different things—that appearance of disagreement about the same matters is an illusion lying in the eyes of the beholder.

But Collingwood’s proposition does not square with the reality of things. Philosophers do discuss the same issues: the issues of moral obligation that concerned Kant are the very selfsame ones with which we still grapple today; the problem of free will that concerned Spinoza is the same one that troubled William James. Indeed the very issue that Collingwood addresses—the problem of philosophical discord—is exactly the same issue about which Immanuel Kant long before him deliberated, condemning this situation as 'the scandal of philosophy.'

Philosophy then, according to Rescher, is the battlefield for a clash of divergent evaluations and beliefs. And there is ample ground for seeing its conflicts as real disagreements issuing from different priorities and different values. Time and again it emerges that those disputes are not spurious illusions engaged by linguistic incomprehension but rather differences as to priority and weight in the assessment and interpretation of evidentiary considerations. When Machiavelli rejected the significance of morality in international affairs and Kant insisted upon it, they were not discussing different issues in reciprocally incompressible terms. The medieval schoolmen rightly held disputation to be a natural procedure of philosophizing exactly because philosophical positions are inherently debatable. Almost invariably philosophical questions admit of conflicting and yet not wholly implausible alternative responses.

Philosophy is a lot like engineering—albeit engineering with concepts rather than with materials. The airplane of today is a lot more complicated than that of a century ago. So is the automobile. And so is philosophy. For in philosophy as in engineering every 'improvement' designed to reduce some problem or other creates further different problems of its own. And in both fields it transpires that perfection is unattainable. We have to do the best we can with the materials at our disposal. None of our resolutions of the issues are free of problems, and with complexity comes disagreement.'

"Rescher then told us another story," the Moon added. "In history of the ship of Theseus, the Greek historian and moralist Plutarch (ca. 48–125 AD) propounded a puzzle that soon split philosophers into rival schools:

The ship wherein Theseus and his young Athenians returned from Crete had thirty oars, and was preserved by the Athenians down even to the time of Demetrius Phalereus, for they took away the old planks as they decayed, putting in new and stronger timber in their place, in so much that this rebuilt ship became a standing example among the philosophers, for the logical question of the identity of things; one side holding that the ship remained the same, and the other contending that it was not the same.

Much the same issue was posed by Thomas Hobbes’s example of Sir John Cutler’s stockings, which in the course of time wore out totally, bit by bit, with every hole repaired by darning needle and a thread until ultimately nothing of the original material recurred. Was the ultimate result still the same pair of stockings?

So with regard to physical objects like boats and stockings, just what is it that determines transtemporal sameness or identity? Is it material continuity, with structure playing a secondary (or even nonexistent) role, or is it structural continuity, with materials playing a secondary (or even nonexistent) role? Is it process or product that is paramount? And is the whole issue one of nature or of mere convention?

And what of immaterial objects? When you play a piece on the piano and then the violin is it still 'the same piece'? And if you translate a Homeric epic, from Greek into English, is it still the same work? Such puzzles tend to divide people into different schools. But what does this mean for the philosophical enterprise?

The theorists of a 'positivistic' orientation would say that the issue is pointless because such questions have no tenable answer at all. Their 'doctrinalistic' opponents would counter that there is just one right answer: majority rules—as long as most of the original material remains, that boat or stocking is the same, but after that it becomes different. And the 'contextualist' would say that it all depends on the purposive context in the Theseus case, as long as the same groups of seamen are involved in a common voyage in that slow changing craft—that is, as long as the vessel’s role in the story exhibits such continuity, it remains the same boat.

So, what we have here is a typical philosophical debate where different 'schools of thought' arise to advocate different and discordant resolutions. The explanation for such sharp differences of philosophical opinion is not far to seek. After all, the task of the subject is to engage with fundamental and far-ranging questions regarding the relation of ourselves to our fellows and to the world we share in common. Addressing these matters unavoidably involves basic issues of outlook and orientation. For if you function in the evidentiary context of a historian, there is no question but that you are bound to see the ship as the same; while for the issue of maritime insurance, it could well fail to count as such. So it is more than likely that when we disagree regarding 'the same X'—the same person, or poem, or ship what is actually at issue may well not be a single universal idea but a variety of distinct matters differentiated by purposive considerations."

"Does disagreement serve any constructive purpose?" asked Swara when she was about to end the talk, "Evidently it can and should. For it provides each participant in a controversy with an incentive to extend and deepen our knowledge in a search for convincing reasons. Coping with reasoned disagreement is clearly a goad to inquiry and precludes yielding too readily to our initial inclinations to identify our options with the uncontestable truth of things."

And as a closing, listen to this story and take a closer look for the relationship with our discussion, 'Two serious fishermen were out in the middle of the lake. For two hours neither of them moved a muscle. Then one became restless.

'Friend,' said his buddy, 'that’s the second time you’ve moved your foot in twenty-five minutes. Did you come out here to fish or dance?'"

"And Allah knows best."

Before her echoes had gone, Swara was chanting,

I have lived for love

But now that's not enough

For the world I love is dying

And time is not a friend

As friends we're out of time

And it's slowly passing by

Right before our eyes *)

Citations & References:

- Nicholas Rescher, A Journey through Philosophy in 101 Anecdotes, University of Pittsburgh Press
- Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From, Riverhead Books
*) "Saltwater" written by Julian Lennon, Mark Spiro & Leslie Spiro
[Session 8]
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